Sample Rate Converters (SRC) are important VLSI (Very Large Scale of Integration) devices used in many segments of the consumer market, such as Car Audio, Home Video/Home Theatre, Hi-Fi, and need to adapt the sample rates used by some standards to the rates required by emerging standards. A well-known example is the 44.1 KHz:48 KHz SRC, converting the earlier audio data rate of the CD format to the more qualitative data rate of DAT (Digital Audio Tape) and DVD (Digital Video Broadcasting).
A L:M Fractional SRC (F-SRC) receives L samples in a predefined interval Ts, and outputs M samples in the same interval Ts, being L, M integers: therefore, if L<M, it somehow ‘creates’ and ‘inserts’ M−L samples each L input samples into the output stream, or deletes L−M each L if L>M. These operations require special care and cannot be executed by directly inserting/canceling the |M−L| samples, because of the generation of images and alias signals into the output stream.
Therefore classical and known implementations of F-SRCs require an interpolator, anti-imaging/anti-aliasing FIR (Finite Impulsive Response) filter, working at the oversampling rate of L*M/Ts samples/sec. Finally a L:1 decimation stage lowers the output rate down to M/Ts samples/sec. In the following it is assumed that L, M, are coprime integers.
For example, in FIG. 1 is illustrated a typical and known implementation of a sampling rate conversion based on a polyphase filter structure. This is a bank of M FIR filters with identical number of taps, the same gain, but different phase delays. Each of the FIR banks is called a phase of the polyphase filter. The data stream is filtered with the M banks in parallel, therefore M stream are generated in the same time interval Ts, and the data rate is increased by a factor M. In a Rate Adapting Stage, the output of the polyphase filter is decimated times a factor L with a selection logic that selects 1 data each L in a round-robin, thus the final output rate turns out to be multiplied times a factor M/L. If the bandwidth and the phase delays of the polyphase filter are suitably chosen this processing performs the sample rate conversion from L/Ts samples/sec to M/Ts samples/sec preserving the spectral quality of the input signal.
This known method, although being simple, has however some drawbacks. First of all it is really expensive if L, M, are large and high quality of signal is required. As an example the case of a 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz SRC can be considered, where L=147 and M=160. If a 64 tap FIR filter is selected for each phase (and in some cases this may not be enough to meet high quality requirements), a total of 64*160=10240 filtering coefficient are required. This will greatly increase both the hardware size in terms of gates and the power consumption of the device and it is not feasible in practical applications.